The country changes hands. But if anybody's controlling the weather they're not doing an important amount of it. Some things are on fire but the strategic targets are in cities anyway. Narcis doesn't know what kind of fool would live in a city. Nobody is that good at being a neighbor that they should have to perform it twenty four hours a day. Better if it takes a good long while to get to your brother-in-law's place so that by the time you can knock and give him a piece of your mind, some of it's fallen by the wayside and the loaf cake you brought over is as heavy as ever. Better if you only see the priest a couple of times a year and you can dip your head and say some words and move on with your life. Better if the fancy folk expect your children to be stupid, so when they take them to school you can have them back home again in a month, bragging about how they "forgot" the alphabet so many times that not only did the teacher beat them, the principal beat the teacher. So the country changes hands! Will the new Queen be deciding what to plant? How much garlic to put in a sausage and how many berries in a pie? Do we expect her for dinner next Oathday? No? Then she doesn't matter. The things that matter are the things that happen every day: the sun rising. The rain falling or not falling. Supper on the fire and children with warm enough socks for the winter and your wife in the right bed and not any wrong ones and rabbits in your lettuces and a good sheepdog.
Anyway, when the country changes hands it doesn't matter, but then a new thing that happens every day begins to... happen every day, and Narcis Soler is a cleric of Erastil.
The big whoop about those is that they can cast Plant Growth....... at third circle. So he's a small whoop of a cleric. But he gets mileage out of Guidance and Create Water and Mending. Stabilizes hurt sheep, that's handy in lambing season. Light will be good in winter. Ant Haul saves some trips. When there's a wild boar sniffing around he preps Cause Fear, though it's never actually needed. Folks aren't going around slicing their own arms and gouging their own legs nearly so often as all the fuss about channels would indicate but it's nice to have them. Endure Elements he didn't know existed, but here it is. You'd think all this would save time, but everybody for miles around knows that Soler's a steady fellow and now he has spells and, sure, he can share them around, some.. Not for any fair-weather friend who never gave anybody the time of day before, mind. If you put in something he'll put in for you - doesn't have to be much, but you have to do something for your neighbors, mind their children or patch their roof or have them over for lunch a few more times when they're having a lean year or teach their daughter to knit. If you like to live your whole life being no use to anybody Soler is of no use to you.
One of Soler's kids was pretending particularly hard to forget the alphabet, and one day she comes home from market, and says that it says on the bulletin board that clerics of Good gods are supposed to form churches or something? Are supposed to meet in the capital to talk about the country changing hands? She is not totally sure from the writing of the announcement if he is going to be chased down should he fail to appear or how it will be enforced if he will.
And, well. The Queen doesn't happen to him every day, but if someone does hunt him down for chanting over his bow and arrow to make the work go quicker and the pitchfork knit itself back together? Then him being gone will hang over every day for his village and his family. They're ahead on everything important, right now; they limped along without a cleric and now they've caught up from there. If they take a while to get around to finding where he's at, then the attempt to press him into service could come at a worse time.
He grumbles his way around to every house to make sure they've all got what they need, and then he sets off.
